Saturday, November 02, 2013

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

I am having a bad production day today, so I thought why not write about the best production times for Lebanon.

Lebanon is a country rich with talent and with stories. We have an excellent foundation for cinematic resources. We have beautiful and various location types: Mountains, beaches, forests, valleys, cities and villages, etc... We have many cinema and audiovisual programs at universities and institutes, that graduate hundreds of students every year and throw them into the market.

Yet when it comes to film production, we have huge trouble financing films of world quality. Even well known talents like Nadine Labaki and Ziad Doueiri have to fill out funding applications from Arab and Foreign film funds. This post is not to complain about funding applications but rather to complain about the lack of financing from our Ministry of Culture. Culture is one thing we might still have a chance with in our Lebanon.

Last I visited the Ministry of Culture in an old building that needs a grant itself, the employees informed us that the ministry provides a maximum amount of 8 Million Lebanese Liras (5,300 USD) for feature films.

In the new Lebanon, the ministry of culture will provide grants of up to 200,000 USD per feature film. It will finance five films every year and will not grant the same filmmaker money two years in a row. It will encourage Arab and Foreign countries to come co-produce films in/with Lebanese producers. Lebanese films will take 2 to 3 years to get made instead of the 5 to 7 years it now takes each of them to be made.

In the new Lebanon, the ministry of culture will also protect cinema artists to tell whatever stories they want to tell, in total freedom. The ministry will realize that art is necessary for society's evolution, not for political propaganda purposes. And in that new Lebanon, there will be a Lebanese film in Cannes and Berlin and Venice every year.

In the new Lebanon, the Lebanese people will flock to movie theaters to watch stories about their own society, not about other societies in other continents only. Through watching these stories, the Lebanese people will ask themselves questions, will try to find answers, will laugh and will cry, and will realize that Lebanon matters; that there is hope for a country when it has artists with beautiful and colorful spirits who actually respect the audience and treat its members as smart human beings; artists who want to touch their hearts and minds and tell them powerful stories that need to be told to the world.